Joana

This episode had quite a lot of those funny little moments that reminded me of the good old times. Stage Sensations, #Olwba, Jane's and Petra's interaction, the "Czech proverb"... I enjoyed it. I kinda wish Skanky Xo and (Alba voice) Slotty Cristol could stick together as unlikely partners. It could have been fun. But it was great to see Xiomara interact with someone outside her family for a change. I really like her character and I feel she's been quite underused lately. I thought Yeal really did a fabulous job as Anezka in that brief scene. There was something weird about how Anezka acted during her conversation with Luisa and I couldn't quite point my finger to it, but then it made perfect sense. I just hope they're not doing what Grey's Anatomy just did and try to put a character's inexplicable/awful/inexplicably awful behaviour down to a brain tumor, or something like that. Luisa's story really, really, REALLY needs a resolution, but not a cop-out like that. Rafael was such an asshole throughout the episode, but that ending, ouch. And to echo what everyone else has already said, they're calling the baby "Baby"? Seriously?!! Not that Michealina is that much better, TBH. Is that even a name? I was desperate for the show to honour Michael in some way, but that was not really my cup of tea.

TBH, I thought the chief resident thing was only mentioned for the sake of continuity, to show us that they still remember such position exists. Just like we had a shout-out to Ben's transsexual sister in the same episode. I feel like establishing connection with past events is something they're really going for this season. Of course, on the other hand we have Jo not wanting to publish her name in the paper while she's already testified in court before and had her name out in public, or everyone being so excited about Meredith's Harper Avery nomination after it's been made well clear no one from GSMH will never win it.

The thing is, I don't ever see Maggie saying she's pretty just like that. It would be more something like: "I'm pretty. Right? I'm pretty, right? I am pretty. Do you think I'm pretty? My mom always said I'm pretty. But, would De Luca have dumped me like that if I really was pretty? So, I'm pretty, but not everyone thinks I'm pretty enough. Riggs didn't. But, no, I am pretty. Really, I am. Someone please shut me up". Now, that I could believe.

What? Maggie has always been portrayed as socially awkward, almost painfully so; she's far from some epitome of a strong, confident, hear-me-roar woman. That's why her "I'm so amazing!!!!11" speech felt wildly OOC, but I wouldn't read too much into it. It was just lousy writing.

Eh, this episode was... alright? I didn't hate it or anything, but I actually found myself liking the previous one much more, which is weird. I know that domestic abuse is an important issue that should be talked about more, I really do, but sorry, I just can't get behind Jo's horrendously retconned abusive husband story. It doesn't fit in her backstory and no matter what they keep saying, whenever I look at her I DON'T see an abuse survivor or fugitive. I really hope that storyline is resolved in a bubble episode, so I can skip it altogether. Another thing I really don't care about is Jackon's premature midlife crisis or whatever he has going on for himself. He just came across as SO unlikeable and douchy in this episode that for the first time I actually thought I wouldn't mind having him gone. It's a shame the boat thing wasn't more fun. Like pretty much everyone else said, these guys have very little chemistry together and the whole thing felt so random and pointless. I guess what we took from it was that Ben is leaving (which we knew already) and we got to see De Luca without his shirt on. Yay. If they do another round of "Arizona is dating a bisexual woman and feels insecure about that", I'm going to flip. And speaking of which, why can't they get her a love interest that works? I mean, Callie and Penny were a dreadful couple, but they were still much better together than Arizona's two previous relationships - and that says a lot about how awful they've been!

1) Kids on telenovelas are not some cutsey wise beyond age little adorable things. 2) JtV is not a telenovela, as much as it would seem to like do be able to hand-wave every single piece of lazy writing to it being one.

I think Arizona's leg is one of those things like buying out the hospital or Meredith having her third kid. Or, hell, having kids at all. It gives some storytelling material for a while, but it doesn't really work in the long run because it affects so many other possible storylines and the writers really need to commit to it if it's going to work. It's too much hassle and all those things usually get conviniently ignored after some time.

I've never had the impression that Owen is particularly religious. Was it ever mentioned? What April and him have in common is that they both like/want children, but that goes for the vast majority of people, so it hardly makes them soulmates. Their relationship is that of a mentor and a student, it's well functional that way and bringing in a romantic aspect at this point would be weird. Amelia and De Luca would be another random pairing in a "they're both there, so why not" sort of way, but who knows with this show anymore.

I actually liked this episode more than I thought I would. It was very.... fitting. A lot of loose ends were tied and things felt definite. That's really important because basically all the storylines that got resolved here really, really need to stay in the past and never rear their head again. Although Megan seems like quite an interesting character, her story is just SO ridiculous that the longer she stayed, the more glaring holes would come through. This way it's much better to imagine she's living a happy life with Riggs and Farouk off-screen, so we don't have to think about how it's possible that no one immediately pursued her helicopter or how she wasn't found in 10 years or how she crossed paths were some Syrian refugees wherever she was kept or how she was allowed to adopt their son and raise him as her own or how she's so thoroughly unaffected by the whole experience except for deciding she wants to leave on the beach. It kinda sucks to lose Riggs this way (we didn't even see him say goodbye to April!) because I feel his character did have a lot of potential, but turning into an obsessed Meredith stalker ruined him beyond repair. Too bad, but it's great that their debacle of a relationship is gone for good. I'll try not to think it's inevitably leading to MerLex just yet. "I/you married a tumor and we don't belong together" is an incredibly lazy cop-out for that hideous mess that Owen and Amelia together are, but I'll take it. Those two really needed to be split and I'll scream bloody murder if they ever try to put them back together AGAIN. I really miss Teddy and wish she was still on the show. However, if she was, you just know they'd put her on an endless "Will they or won't they??!!" merry-go-round with Owen and it would be infuriating. The show just lost quite a bit of dead weight it's been carrying for seasons and it's good.

I found it interesting in the beginning because "Passions of Santos" looked like something that could be an actual telenovela, but all the later stuff with space combat and time travel and whatnot feels way too gimmicky. BTW, killing off a main character in a telenovela is not "the oldest trick in the book", it's in fact done extremely rarely and is almost always a result of some external factors. As for who's going to die, I think the only one we can absolutely count out is Rafael. Alba is extremely unlikely too. Petra dying would obviously be horrendous, but I wouldn't completely write it out. The direction the writing for her character has taken over the last season has been rather weird. Still, I don't think so. I too hope it's Anezka, but I have a feeling it's going to be Magda. I don't think they're going anywhere serious with that storyline and Magda's death would have by far the least impact - honestly, who would ever notice that she's gone?

That's what we said the first 75 times Ross and Rachel broke up and look where it got us! Love triangles are always going to be a part of this show in some form for as long as it airs, that is clear by now. I intensely dislike it, but I'm willing to overlook it if other things work well, and that is pretty hit and miss at the moment. The show has A LOT of dead weight going all the way back to season 1 that it just refuses to get rid of (Luisa/Rose, Magda etc.), while being unable to seriously commit to any new storylines - for example, this was the first we heard of Xiomara's dance studio since God knows how long. Also, I feel like they've been retconning a lot lately (Fun Jane is not someone we know) and I find it off-putting. On the other hand, this episode had more genuinely LOL-worthy moments than I've seen in a long time ("spot the difference" between Real Alba and Fun Alba totally cracked me up), so not all is lost. I just wish they'd tighten it up a bit. The show can still be at least nearly as good as it once was. Also, I was pleasantly surprised they didn't use the tired "Anezka pretends to be Petra" trick. When they were about to enter the room at the end of the episode, I was almost convinced that they're going to walk in on Rafael making out with what's her name (after Anezka posing as Petra had broken up with him) and that she was going to be disappointed in him and blah. Instead, it turned out that Magda had returned. Not that her comeback is much better option, but you have to take what you get at this point.

Megan obviously has to die if Meredith and Riggs are going to be together, but any further attempt at their relationship is... not even beating a dead horse. It's beating the fossil remains of a prehistoric horse. I'm not sure I've ever seen such a spectacularly botched relationship on any TV show, TBH. On the second thought, we have Owen/Amelia on the same show at the same time, so... yeah. I don't mind Riggs, actually, but he was most definitely brought in as a love interest for Meredith and I'm not sure how interested they are in writing for him beyond that. And if someone is to leave, I'd much prefer it if it was Owen, because I simply don't know what else there is to write about him anymore. I thought they were setting up his exit with Teddy, but as she doesn't appear to come back again outside this upcoming flashback episode I guess it's not going to happen. I do have a feeling they're writing Riggs out, and that coupled with the fact that Ben is leaving too is why De Luca seems to be getting a bigger role.

This, a million times. God, what is it with this show? We've been running in circles forever. Didn't Michael have to die so that the show could take a new, interesting, wild, unpredictable etc. direction? So, where is it? Love triangles are OLD. Petra pretending to be Anezka and vice versa is OLD. Everything about Rose being evil!!!1 is OLD. Jane and Rafael arguing about money is OLD. Not to mention that we spent half of the previous season waiting to see if Jane was going to have sex after we waited two full seasons to see... if Jane was going to have sex. Gah. Also, Adam is a BS retcon and I'm not feeling it one bit. I'd much rather Jane had met someone completely new. And the new Mateo is not as cute. Again, gah.

Was it previously established that Harper Avery is a sexist asshole or it's just something they made up on a whim and for the lulz? Anyway, I think they killed him off so that they wouldn't have to bother with all the 1883 versions of Katherine's and Jackson's backstory. Amelia having a brain tumor (of a kind that affects decision making and judgement, no less!) for her entire duration on the show is all kinds of awesome. I guess we're in a for a face transplant some time in the future? An actress wants to leave, so her character has a horrific accident, Jackson performs some kind of a miraculous surgery, and voila, the characters stays on the show, just played by a different person. Why not. Honestly, I think the only reason I'm still watching is that DeLuca is so beautiful. And sweet. And they're giving him more screen time. Keep it up!

Not to mention that while she was there (all 5 seconds of it), she acted more like a friendly colleague than a wife. Which is super bizarre considering that in the previous episode (which happened the day before in the show's universe) she was perfectly stable, normal and provided nothing but support and comfort for Owen. But, you know... TUMOR!!!

PREACH IT! It's not like I didn't expect them to hand-wave the whole situation like that, but it's still extremely annoying. And it kills whatever little interest I had left in Alex and Jo as a couple. I think I'm just gonna fast-forward through their scenes from now on. I'm really ambivalent about these episodes. They had a good flow and didn't feel like a drag, which is already a massive improvement on the previous season - although, it could have hardly been worse than that mess. And I do appreciate that they're trying to address all the issues that have accumulated over the least few seasons. On the other hand, doing it all at the same time might be a bit too much. It doesn't feel organic and it leads to total cop-outs, Amelia's tumor being the most blatant example. Teddy! I've always liked her. I wish she'd stay, but she obviously won't, how would they possibly fit her in? I hope the endgame there is that she and Owen go away together. It would make sense, and frankly, they ran out of stories to tell about him long ago. Megan seems interesting as a character, but she's absolutely not believeable as a hostage. The whole thing looked more like a family reunion after a long tenure abroad than a miraculous resurrection after being presumed dead for years. Is Arizona ever going to operate on tiny humans again or she'll just spend her entire time on the show making out with whatever random Lesbian of the Season they throw at her?

I'll be totally shocked if it doesn't play out exactly like that. In fact, I'll be surprised if it has anything to do with DeLuca to begin with.

Actually, love triangles, jumping from one relationship straight into another, repeatedly falling in and out of love with the same person etc. are decidedly NOT telenovela tropes. When it comes to relationships, telenovelas are very clear-cut: it's more than obvious right from the beginning who the protagonist is going to fall for and that they're going to be together in the end. They do split and then get back together, usually twice over the course of the show, but it's entirely due to the bad guys' schemes and manipulations, and not because they've stopped loving each other. The heroine may date someone else while they're separated or even be engaged and about to get married, but it's 100% clear she's with the other guy solely out of gratitude or spite or whatever, not love. Now, there are telenovelas where the protagonist has two Big Loves. On top of my head I can think of two, "Mi destino eres tu" and "Pobre diabla". Incidentally, both are somehow connected with JtV, as Jaime Camil himself took part in the former, while the protagonist of the latter starred in JtV as Rogelio's scene partner in "Tiago". However, in such cases, the two loves never coexist on the screen - one always precedes the other and the former lover dies before the next one appears. That this show not only made Michael a viable candidate for Jane's heart, but also made him her Real Love and made Petra an actual living, breathing person instead of the "evil wife who does evil things because she is evil" trope basically meant taking two of the biggest tropes and turning them upside down. It was a very anti-talenovela thing to do and it was extremely refreshing. Nowadays, the relationship dynamics on the show look more like fairly standard American TV like Melrose Place or Desperate Housewives with a touch of telenovela.

That's another thing that's been turning me off this show big time lately. The relationship between the three of them seems somehat... incestuous, for lack of better word. I definitely don't mean anything sexual by that (*shudders*), it's just that they totally lack any boundaries and their dynamics are often not just parents-children inappropriate, but inappropriate full stop. I get that some families are tighter than others, but there's tight and then there's suffocating. They should seriously expand their social circles a little. That's another place where Michael's death has left a void - we all remember Brogelios, but he also had a very sweet relationship with Xiomara. Now that's gone and they really haven't replaced it with anything. It almost makes me glad that Darcy is back because at least it means that Xioamara will have to deal with someone outside her immediate family. Yeah, but it was also established that they had a good time together and cared for each other for a while, at least. And I can totally buy that - those two are a lot alike and I can see how it would be something that both draws them together and drifts them apart. Exploring that would be interesting, but it's all moot now because it's obvious the writers were never serious about putting them back together to begin with.

I found it seriously off-putting, especially as they made it clear that his death was the result of shooting. I stopped hoping for some kind of big pay-off as it occurred to me a while ago that it's probably not where the show is going (there was this strange lack of urgency about finding Rose/Sin Rostro while Michael was alive still), but to have this connection go completely unnoticed by literally everyone really pissed me off. I agree that Petra being Petrafied for so long was the show's biggest misstep. And already at the time I thought it was quite out of character for the show to keep it going as long as it did and I found it weird. In hindsight, they were probably trying to buy some time preparing for Michael's death.

This is what I disagree about. It probably wasn't planned, but I think Brett Dier had become a co-protagonist, and so had Yael Grobglas. It's highly likely not something that the writers had envisioned in the beginning and it was something that simply developed organically over time, but at one point those two got as much screen time as Rodriguez and Baldoni and their characters were as central and important for the story. In retrospect, it seems clear that something happened after S2 that made them go back to the original plan, with Michael out of the picture and Petra more relegated to the background. I still think it's extremely disappointing, but of course, it's just water under the bridge now.

OMG, we saw Michael!!! And... that about sums up my feelings about this episode. It would be really nice, though, if Jane had in any shape or form acknowledged that the woman who KILLED her husband was now in prison, or if anyone else on the show had noticed it, but I guess you can't have it all. I cannot emphasize how over Luisa and Anezka I am at this point. I loved Luisa. She used to be such a loveable mess, but now she's just a mess and it's irredeemable. And while I was never fully on board with having Anezka on the show, I thought her presence would at least make for some interesting storylines. This is just stale and tired. Not to mention the way they've playing her has been mostly ridiculous. It was all just so neat and formulaic. Of course Darcy would be pregnant. Not a doubt Michael would give his blessings to Jane from his grave. I doubt he even gets mentioned more than a couple of times next season. OF COURSE Jane runs into her old flame just in time to make another love triangle/rectangle/whatever. It's going to the way of Susan/Mike/Ian on Desperate Housewives, I can bet. I guess this show really is a telenovela, just without the sillyness and the goofyness and the ironic distance it used to have and that it made it so great - at least for me. And I've watched far too many telenovelas in my life to ever be enthusiastic about one again. So, so long show, we had a nice time. LOL, I haven't seen those episodes, but it's like the biggest non-spoiler ever. :D I fully expected it ever since her character was first mentioned. Did it happen just when Meredith and Nathan finally confessed their undying love for each other? I swear the GA and JtV writers should get together and write what would be the mother of all telenovelas, they certainly have the material.

I have a feeling that Luisa is going to use the information that Rafael is not a Solano by birth against him in the next episode and dread it already.

No, there was never even a hint of that. There was some possibility/speculation (among the viewers, not on the show itself) at the time that the father would turn out to be Aaron/whatshisname (Rafael's supposed best friend and Petra's former lover), but since he's actually even darker than Rafael, the twins being angelic blondes would make even less sense. There was no mention of Petra having a sexual partner other than that. It would be a huge retcon at this point and I highly doubt they'd go there.

So the finale is next week? I'm going to watch it and wrap it up. The direction this show is taking can't be more obvious now and it's not something I'm particularly interested in. I used to truly love this show, but for a while now I've had trouble really caring about most of the stuff that happens there. I feel like the things I've loved the most about the show have been removed or significantly reduced, while the things I didn't really care for got umped to the max. And most importantly, it's just not as funny as it was. But hey, it's not the first time it's happened and certainly won't be the last. At least it was really good while it lasted.